reconnect

The live terminal's socket reopens itself after a genuine drop (a backend restart), loudly — so a pane never needs a manual refresh.

A live terminal pane must never need a manual page refresh to come back. The live-view backend fix removed the cause that used to freeze a pane — a per-session bridge dying under a still-open socket — so bridge churn no longer closes the socket at all. What remains is the one case the backend cannot mask: a backend process restart (the zero-downtime supervisor reload), which genuinely drops every socket.

So the client owns recovery from a real drop, and only from a real drop. The socket reopens itself: on an unexpected close it retries with capped, escalating backoff, indefinitely, while surfacing a visible "reconnecting…" state — the pane tracks a small connecting | open | reconnecting health and shows it in a corner caption, so recovery is loud, never a silently dead pane. A connection that stays healthy a few seconds resets the backoff; a flapping server escalates to the cap instead of hammering it. The single intentional close — the pane unmounting, when a session goes offline and the header swaps in the relaunch panel — stops reopening for good.

Recovery is a stateless reopen, not a resync or sequence protocol. The endpoint is addressed by a stable session id and the backend holds all state in tmux, so a reopen is answered exactly like a first connect: a single coherent full repaint onto a freshly reset screen. There is nothing on the client to replay or reconcile — which is why reconnection here is a thin transport concern, not a correctness mechanism, and why it does not reintroduce the snapshot-splice scramble live-view warns against.

The reconnect lives in a small, framework-agnostic helper that the terminal wires its open / message / state callbacks into; its WebSocket implementation and timers are injectable, so the reconnect state machine — backoff schedule, stable-vs-flapping reset, intentional-close suppression, state transitions — is verifiable headlessly, with no browser and no real network.